According to the related art, highly diverse field busses such as CAN or FlexRay, and occasionally tree, ring, or star topologies are used for transmitting messages between control units (electronic control units, ECUs) and field devices such as sensors or final controlling elements. The different communication mechanisms utilized by the messages therefore require the use of different protocol families, some of which are based on the Internet Protocol (IP); examples of such protocol families are mentioned in the standards IEC 61784-1 and IEC 61784-2, for example.
DE 1983 2531 A1 describes a controller for a large number of electrical consumers in a motor vehicle, in the case of which a simple configuration and a flexible applicability and extensibility is achieved by the fact that each one of the electrical consumers is situated together with a local computer in a consumer module and is controlled within the consumer module by the associated local computer, and that the local computers are linked to a central computer via a data bus and exchange control data in accordance with a standard protocol.